


that you're the one who's taking me home

by tremontaine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 18:38:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14721473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tremontaine/pseuds/tremontaine
Summary: Dating's easier when you're brainwashed.





	that you're the one who's taking me home

Natasha wasn’t really given to hope. She’d packed it in, years ago, as a bad job: if, every time you let it in, disappointment followed, logic suggested that sooner or later it was time to shut it out and deal with what was in front of you, step by step, day by day. _We have what we have while we have it_ , she’d said to Steve once, and that quiet mantra, that determination to accept what she couldn’t change instead of railing against it till it killed her, was a part of what had kept her going for so long: ingrained habit.

The trouble with habits, of course, was that you could get locked into them – penned up.

+++

The trouble with Bucky Barnes was that he was a habit of hers too.

+++

Almost from the first they had been partnered together because Natasha liked working with snipers, and Barnes had seemed to know by some sixth sense exactly what she needed from him to get the job done. They had fallen easily into a rhythm and understanding in the field that required no adjustments or conversations or explanations. They were both the best at what they did, and Natasha had been delighted to discover that with a quiet hint here and there, Barnes was actually pretty good at her end of the job as well as his own. (She had a strong suspicion that he had set himself to learning it because he preferred manipulating people over shooting them. That was fine with her – whatever he was comfortable with, as long as it got results.)

So yes. They were thrown together a lot, and sometimes she thought – maybe – maybe. But there was a silence in him, a wariness. Restraint, perhaps. It set her on her guard. A thousand times she decided that tomorrow she would ask him, or drop some hint he could not ignore; a thousand times she chickened out.

 _We have what we have while we have it_. We have what we have until we’re given irrevocable proof that it’s gone.

He was happy, she was fairly sure – or if not that, certainly content, with freedom, and peace, and a job to do, and Steve of course – content the same way she was content, secure in the knowledge that his choices were his own. That made anything bearable.

+++

He was always kind – quietly, unobtrusively; if you wanted someone to talk to a victim, or coax a smile and a coherent story out of a witness, your best bet, besides herself, was to ask Bucky Barnes – especially, she’d been delighted to discover, if there were kids involved. Three younger sisters, Steve had once told her, with enough of an age gap between him and the youngest that Natasha guessed Barnes had done a lot of babysitting, learning to deal with tantrums and outbursts and kids’ weird swerves of logic. One day, coming in late, she wandered into the common room and found him leaning over a small boy perched on a chair at the big kitchen table, saying something about long division.

“Study hour?” Natasha said.

“I hate math,” Cooper said sourly. He’d just hit the age when he considered it undignified to jump off his chair and come for a hug, which Natasha found both adorable and, stupidly, a tiny bit hurtful.

“You’re nearly there,” Barnes said.

“If I get this bit right will you tell me another story about the Commandos?”

“Bribery!” Natasha said. “Very ethical.”

Barnes said, “He says he gets it from you.”

“Pfft,” Natasha said. “You know what his dad does for a living, right?”

“Remodel the kitchen,” said Coop.

Barnes laughed out loud. “They’re in the briefing room I think,” he said to Natasha, meaning Clint and Laura.

“I figured,” Natasha said. Barney had rung, which usually meant trouble; he and Clint between them could turn petty FBI-vs-SHIELD pissing matches into World War Three. They didn’t really mean it, but god it was tedious to listen to. “Did you leave Lila and Nate in the hall closet?”

“They found Parker’s comic book collection,” Barnes said, grinning.

“I hope none of it was valuable.”

“Bucky says the Cap ones are way less interesting than the real thing.”

“That’s usually the case.”

“Bucky says Cap never even met FDR.”

“But he voted for him,” Barnes said comfortingly.

“And that –”

“Finish your homework,” Natasha said, “and then we’ll all sit and listen.”

Lila and Nate had taken to Barnes as well. Watching him with Lila made Natasha wonder quite suddenly how badly he missed his sisters, how much of them he remembered… he got on well with Shuri too, with little Cassie Lang, with Wanda, who wasn’t all that much older than the age the oldest of his sisters must have been when he had – fallen.

It was odd, this change of perspective. Natasha sat and listened to him tell the kids about the time Steve had fallen out of a tree in the Ardennes and how five hours later they’d stumbled into what they thought was an abandoned farm and been given the fright of their lives by a troop of panicked chickens, and felt strangely as if she was meeting this man for the first time.

“What happened to the chickens?” Lila wanted to know.

“We found them a good home,” Barnes said, straight-faced.

“You ate them!” said Cooper.

“That’s not very nice!”

“I’ll find you some K-rations sometime and we’ll see how you like eating nothing else for weeks on end.”

“Auntie Nat wouldn’t have let you eat the chickens.”

“Auntie Nat would have been the first to suggest it,” Natasha said. “Though she wouldn’t have blundered right into a chicken coop in the first place.”

Giggles all round.

“D’you think you and Cap would have been friends if you’d been alive back then?” Cooper said. “You could’ve worked for the SSR too!”

“That would’ve been fun,” Natasha said neutrally.

Barnes cocked his head, looking at her, but all he said was, “She’d probably have been running the SSR.”

+++

From then on Natasha tried to get to know him again, quietly, subtly, yet feeling guilty for it at the same time, as if making the attempt was in and of itself a form of lying to him, since he didn’t have context.

Occasionally she tried justifying it by appealing to the logic of her older self – that version of Natasha Romanov who had not yet developed this pesky distaste for mistrusting her friends. (Younger self? No. Definitely older. She was mentally regressing, in her old age, back to twenty-seven and too idealistic to live. The shelling would start any day now.) He’s dangerous still, that line of thinking ran. He’s private and still wary, and often withdrawn; one of us, other than Steve, needs to have a handle on him, to be able to recognise the line between normal behaviour and something – else. Occasionally she even thought, _if he’s going to be near the kids_...

Sometimes she was sure that was a disgusting excuse. Sometimes she looked at herself with the dispassionate and objective eye of an outside observer and knew quite well that she meant it perfectly.

+++

Natasha had pilfered his service records long ago, and found a strange enjoyment in comparing his aptitudes and tests to Steve’s, as if lists of similarities and differences could help. People were not, as a rule, comparable to each other in that way. At least, that was her professional knowledge. Personal conviction insisted that knowing Steve as well as she did must be good for something, when it came to Bucky Barnes.

+++

Her plan to view Barnes, from now on, as a person completely detached from the man she(’d) loved had gone the proverbial way of all plans ever, and not survived first contact with the enemy. This was for the very simple reason that they were not, in fact, completely detached from each other at all.

+++

Barnes liked music. He could be spotted, if you were careful, with headphones in, listening to all kinds of stuff; he was the only one of them who habitually had the radio on in his office, and Natasha wondered sometimes if he liked to dance.

+++

She kept seeing paperbacks sticking out of the oversized pockets of his overcoats, and it was an immense frustration to her that she never found out any of the titles.

+++

Once, early on, she’d stuck her head into his office and found him bent over his cell phone, disabling every function on it that made it in any way a useful machine in order to avoid trackers.

“If our network’s secure enough for me not to get paranoid fits it ought to be secure enough for you,” she’d said.

“You change your hair like other people change their socks and you think you don’t get paranoid fits?” he’d said.

Natasha had laughed. “That’s not what I said, and it’s also not remotely comparable.”

“I lived in this city for nearly thirty years, I do not need a phone to tell me how to find a deli.”

“No, I’m sure you follow your nose,” she’d said, and left him to it.

+++

The next time they got stranded in the middle of the Australian outback – long story – he’d asked her, grinning, if she still knew how to read a paper map, and she’d thrown a handful of pebbles at him.

+++

Nobody else had read his Army records, that much had quickly become clear – or at least nobody else currently on the team; there was no way that Clint, Laura, and Maria had not been over the files with a fine-tooth comb – and few people had bothered to research Bucky Barnes at all. What interest he’d held for twentieth-century historians had been as Steve Rogers’ best friend, and later the focus had been on the Winter Soldier. The details of Barnes’ life before the war seemed to have gotten lost in the proverbial mists of time, and he himself seemed to have no interest in making them known. Natasha thought it was pretty funny, the way he adroitly sidestepped the existence of his engineering degree whenever there was a possibility of it becoming relevant.

Steve usually did too, but being Steve he sometimes got these fits of conscience.

“He could go back to school or something.”

The Winter Soldier at MIT. Natasha had to stifle a snigger. That would end well.

“Like you did?” she said instead. “Maybe he needs some distance, you know, something new. Wouldn’t it be weird and – and all wrong for you to go back to school and have to write papers about, I don’t know, Warhol and Pollack?”

Steve looked at her. She spread her hands, gesturing with her pint glass; he ordered them another each, shaking his head.

“What. I’m trying to be nice and understanding about your BFF.” Layers and layers in _that_ sentence.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Romanov,” said Steve – a little too solemnly to be entirely sober, she thought, smiling – “but you’re adorable. I went to art school with Jackson Pollack.”

Tony pitched a fit when Natasha told him that, and Steve wouldn’t talk to her for three days.

+++

There: similarities. Holding something back, and – at least on one level – doing it because they thought it was funny.

Well, Natasha wasn’t innocent of that either, was she. She read Cicero for fun, for god’s sake, and pretended to ostentatious ignorance of Russian writers in general and Tolstoy in particular because watching other people pontificate at her about the rich cultural and literary heritage she’d turned her back on was fucking hilarious.

+++

When, one day, Barnes finished up a particularly long debrief report by putting his glass of water down and saying, “And anyway, Carthago delenda est; let’s get out of here,” Natasha knew he’d been watching her back.

+++

Recklessness drove her to poke at him. Recklessness and a liking for adrenaline. (It’s called being dumb as a box of rocks, Clint told her. Do not make your niece and nephews attend your funeral.)

“So,” she said, catching up to him in the kitchen one day. “Is baseball your thing?”

Barnes didn’t jump, he was too controlled for that. But he was pouring himself coffee and she saw the way his hand twitched, surprised – either at her question or her presence. Natasha leaned against the cabinet, artfully positioned in a patch of sunlight, warm and golden. She loved sunny days. Most people did, of course, but sometimes she still woke up and looked out at them and thought, what a miracle.

“Why do you ask?”

“Steve’s been checking his phone all afternoon and glaring. I gather there’s a game on and the score is disappointing him.”

Brief little smile. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

Natasha grinned. “Something something the Dodgers?”

Tall men had never intimidated her. She knew how to kill them with her bare hands in a crowded public place without being noticed. But there was something about tipping her head back to look up at Barnes that she’d always liked. Out of uniform, he sometimes had a trick of curving his shoulders in, making himself seem smaller. It made her want to take hold of him and straighten him out.

“Something,” he said. “You’re a tennis kind of girl.”

She laughed. “What makes you say that?”

“No time investment required to make it look plausible that you’re a fan,” he said.

Talk about a slap in the face. Natasha blinked twice. He was dumping sugar into his coffee and didn’t notice, mouth pursed thoughtfully. After two spoons had gone in he said, “You and Steve would both like hockey.” Another flash of a grin. Then he wandered off.

+++

The worst thing was, it turned out she and Steve _did_ both like hockey.

+++

It irritated her, how withdrawn Barnes could be. Aside from making the job of keeping a weather eye on him much more difficult than it needed to be, she could not shake the sense that he did it deliberately. Steve didn’t. If you offered Steve a choice between a fun party and a quiet room with a book you had a sixty-forty chance that Steve would pick the book, because (quite apart from his tendencies towards emotional repression, which Natasha wasn’t always what you’d call in a position to criticise) he was a little introverted and not naturally gregarious. Barnes, on the other hand… well, that was the question, wasn’t it.

Steve had never, back at SHIELD, talked about him. He would joke about his tragic life with a wry, self-deprecating grin, but if anyone so much as hinted at coming within a hundred miles of the subject of Bucky Barnes, Steve would remove himself from the conversation in five seconds flat. Still, since those days, Natasha had managed through museum exhibitions and various books to gain the impression that Barnes had used to like a night out, that he had been the charming one, the one who got them into scrapes and out again with a cheery smile and a few well-chosen words.

That fit, of course, with how good he’d become at her end of the job: he liked people and he understood them. But for some time now she had suspected him of having a set quota of social interactions with the Avengers that he made himself fill for the look of the thing more than anything. She wondered if he went out on his own sometimes the way she did, meeting strangers, trying on roles less burdened with his past. She would have liked to swap stories with him, places to go; find out what he thought of New York now, what was left of the city he’d grown up in.

+++

Again, always, the inability to separate personal curiosity from professional concern, to judge where sensible precautions ended and inappropriate prying began.

+++

Some of her suspicions were confirmed the night she ran into him in her favourite club. Impeccably dressed and clean-shaven, his left arm hidden by a photoveil so he could leave off the glove and roll his sleeves up, he was standing by the bar deep into very serious conversation with a pretty brunette who was gesturing earnestly with her drink. Natasha stopped short and stared for a whole minute. She was sweaty and her feet were starting to hurt and it was ridiculously hot in here; she wanted a drink of water, and possibly a breath of fresh air and a smoke, and then she meant to go back onto the dance floor and dance herself into exhaustion. But here was Bucky Barnes, flirting with a girl, in her club.

 _Her_ club.

It had to be coincidence. No one knew she came here. Though she had not been surprised to find he kept tabs on her, she would have been surprised to find he was clumsy enough to make it _this_ obvious. She marched up to the bar and slid into an empty space just behind Barnes; he jumped and shifted, barely glancing at her. For a moment she was indignant. Then she remembered her photoveil.

“And so this total idiot stands up in the middle of the tutorial and starts pontificating on this theory, you know, that anyone who has opened _Wikipedia_ knows is bullshit, and I’m standing there in front of the whole class not knowing whether to facepalm or just start crying. And –”

“How do people like that even graduate high school,” Barnes wondered.

“I don’t know! I do not know.” The brunette was laughing, her head tipped back, her body arched towards him. “Anyway, what’s your specialty?”

Natasha paid for her water and started drinking right there. The music was throbbing up from the dance floor, but whereas five minutes ago she’d been determined not to care that her feet hurt, now she was beginning to think she might just get a cab.

“Uh, really boring, Great Depression, World War Two,” he said, and kicked Natasha in the shins when she sniggered into her plastic cup. She stumbled against him, apologising profusely; he looked her full in the face and said, “No, I’m sorry, won’t happen again.”

Natasha flashed him a smile. Then she finished her drink, marched out of the club, hailed a taxi, went straight home, showered, and fell into bed.

+++

Damn him anyway – flirting with some random girl in _her_ club, and not even bothering to pretend he didn’t recognise her. He never smiled like that at her. (Anymore.) She’d never seen him slouch like that, languidly on display, for anyone but her; she’d never known him look at anyone else with that heat in his eyes.

+++

 _back in the gaaaaaaaaaaame_ , the text read. It was accompanied by a row of stupid smiley emoticons, one of which was wearing sunglasses.

Bucky stared at it. Then he texted back. _thx for not blowing my cover._

_penniless history postgrad?_

_it’s either that or accountant. i have no other plausible skills_. He’d used to do the books for Dad, and still sometimes poked at the budgets for the Avengers, thinking of it vaguely as keeping his hand in. Finances, maths, were nice, unchanging things; knowing how to balance accounts did not become obsolete with time and technological development.

Long line of emoticons crying with laughter. For a minute or two he paused, searching for the right words to reassure her that he wouldn’t tell anyone, that her secret was her secret and he would neither reveal it nor use it against her. If it had been Steve he would have said –

 _terrible fucking dump of a place. not a decent song on all night_.

Row of exclamation marks. Then: _vera lynn is not danceable._

_hdu. that is one amazing woman._

_…of course you’ve met vera lynn_.

He grinned. Of course he hadn’t, but she didn’t need to know that. Sudden happiness bubbled up in his chest and he didn’t know why, unless that it was easier to talk to her like this: over text he could joke with her easily, could pretend he didn’t constantly want to kiss her sly little smile, put his arm over her shoulders and hold her close. Sometimes she would look at him a certain way, and hope would spring up in his chest like a jack-in-the-box until he stamped it out. Distracted getting off the subway, he didn’t check his phone again till he was in the elevator of his building; she hadn’t written anything else. It wasn’t till the next morning that he found another text from her.

 _thank you_ , it read. 

+++

Natasha sidled up to him a few days later in the hangar, supressing a grin.

“There’s an exhibition on. That you penniless history postgrads would like.”

Barnes gave her a sideways look. “You’re doing your thesis on the collapse of the USSR, aren’t you.”

Natasha crossed her arms over her chest. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

For the first time in years he laughed – properly laughed – at something she’d said. Triumph closed her throat up, watching the lines around his eyes, the loose shoulders, the stretch and curve of that wide, mobile mouth.

“I’ll send you the link,” she said, testing the waters; carefully carefully. It had shocked her how glad she was to see him happy, how much she liked that smile, that delighted laugh. “She’d like it.”

His whole face shut down as if she’d flipped – no, god, she couldn’t finish that thought, not of him. No switches, no buttons.

“That’s all right,” he said, controlled, calm. “It wasn’t anything.”

Inexplicable pits opened up in her chest. “No?”

The look he gave her now was the closest to openly angry with her that she’d ever seen him. “No. I just like to go out.”

“That sounds healthy.”

Barnes set his jaw, glaring. “Healthy! Romanov, you are the single most exasperating woman on the _planet_.”

She was exasperating? _She_ was? But fate had no intention of letting her have the last word: the others arrived just as she’d opened her mouth for a comeback she hadn’t even formulated. And because they hadn’t had the chance to fight it out her resentment and his stiff anger permeated the whole damn mission; she came home still keyed up for a fight that had never materialised, and was forced to take her irrational anger out on a punching bag that, in her mind’s eye, had his stupid handsome inexpressive stoic face painted on it.

One day she was going to crack that impassivity wide open and drag her hands through the morass of his actual honest to god feelings. Exasperating! What the hell did that _mean_? One day – oh, hell.

Typical really that the one person she could not take in a fight and the one person she could not get to the bottom of by any trick or understanding of human nature she had ever learned would be one and the same. Would be _him_.

+++

Anyway. Natasha decided to gracefully forget about that little by-play and pretend it never happened. This was just – the whole thing was getting out of hand. She had promised herself: no more complications, and here she was already hip-deep in one of the worst ones she could imagine, and nothing had even happened yet.

(Well but it had. That was the problem.)

Barnes didn’t forget, damn him. At least, someone left her a small box of her favourite candies on her desk a few days later, and she was willing to bet all her Swiss bank account and several other ones in various small Caribbean islands that it had not been Steve.

Feeling vengeful, she took them round to his office to offer him one.

“From a mysterious secret admirer, apparently,” she said.

“Like I said. Exasperating.” But he took a candy. And he seemed to have come to some kind of decision; there was something new in his face when he looked at her, something… appraising.

+++

You’re imagining things, Natasha told herself. And, hell, hadn’t she been appraising him for weeks?

+++

Three days after that, he went and asked her out.

Natasha had been glad when he joined her in the elevator – they had been stuck in briefings all day and she had been looking forwards to his caustic remarks on the competence of their interlocutors since about five seconds after the first meeting had begun this morning. She’d tried to catch his eye earlier but he hadn’t noticed, and it had disappointed her to miss the opportunity of a conversation with him. And now he went and did this instead. Half a dozen emotions passed through her at the approximate speed of the Concorde, leaving her reeling in the wake of them and trying to rescue some rationality from the rubble.

“A date,” she said, rather proud of the fact that she sounded pleasantly surprised instead of openly panicked. Oh, how to navigate this minefield!

“Well, I thought,” Barnes said. He rubbed his hands together awkwardly. Natasha was almost sure that there was a dusting of red on his cheekbones that one might call a blush. “There’s a place I thought I’d like to take you; it’s cheesy, but you said a coupla weeks ago that you’d never been, and I thought –”

“I said that?” Natasha said. “A couple of weeks ago?” He always did remember little things about people; he was thoughtful that way. Or he was paranoid: who was she to assume that he was not as wary of her as she of him, that his motivations for paying attention to her were not as complicated as hers for paying attention to him? The thought that he would understand her perfectly if she ever tried to put this into words made her terrified and safe at one and the same time.

Barnes peered at her. He had such an expressive face. She liked the way it got all scrunched up when he was worried about something, it made him seem younger. “You did,” he said.

“Oh!” Natasha peered right back at him, completely wrong-footed. Somehow of all the possible results she’d pictured of her total inability to let the man alone to get on with his life the one thing that had never quite crossed her mind was – this. Poor darling. And, oh, fuck it all. She was horribly, horribly predictable.

Apparently so was he. Damn the man.

Into this odd silence fell the ping of the elevator arriving; the doors slid back and cold air slid in. The garage was nearly empty. Barnes stuck his arm out to hold the doors open.

“So, uh –”

Oh, of course. “Yeah – I mean – it’s – I –”

Her face was hot, and apparently some alien telepath had reached inside her mind and scrambled her speech centre.

Barnes’ mouth quirked, but lacking the gleam in his pale eyes, and with his head tilted down and his shoulders slightly hunched, instead of his head back and his shoulders loose, she could tell that it didn’t signify amusement this time. “That’s all right,” he said. “I mean, I’d never be a dick about it.”

“I would never think that,” Natasha said indignantly. “I just – look. It. Um. The thing is, what with – working together, I just.” Working together. God. Working together barely scratched the surface of what the thing was. What was the _matter_ with her?

“Working together,” he said, laughing a bit. “Seriously, _I don’t want to_ is fine for an explanation.”

Stunned into indignation that he would ever think that, Natasha said, “But I _do_.”  His jaw dropped. She’d knocked him into speechlessness; it made her laugh, and that prompted him to shake his head, smiling. “Right,” he said. “So –”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Can we be careful?” Natasha said. “About how we do this?”

Bucky smiled. “I’m not running out of time.” Anymore. “It’s kinda looking like I’m functionally immortal, in fact.”

It occurred to Natasha that this conversation had just opened up the distinct possibility that one day she might be able to say to him, so am I. The thought made her deliciously, delightfully nervous.

“OK,” she said. “So.”

“Coffee? Tomorrow?”

God, they were standing in the elevator doorway like a couple of morons. “Yes!” Natasha said. “Of course. Have a good evening.” What a ridiculous thing to say to someone whose request for a date you’d just sort-of-but-not-actually-at-all turned down in the least graceful way possible. She swallowed and jerked her jacket straight as they parted, watching his thighs in those delicious jeans and the way his coat emphasised his shoulders and the powerful solidity of his torso rather than meet his eyes. They saw so much, those eyes; too much. He was as observant as she was, and the fact that he did not need to actually remember her to have a pretty decent idea of what her past was like meant that often she felt transparent when he looked at her, nervous and hot. She wasn’t used to being understood – _really_ understood, in every part of her. Mostly it was fun, having someone around who never asked awkward questions and who sniggered instead of looking horrified if she made a dreadful joke about brainwashing.

Right now, it was not fun. Right now, it made her feel… raw. She was going to take that as a sign: she hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time.

“You too,” Barnes said. The full soft mouth was struggling not to smile too widely. Suddenly Natasha stopped.

“Barnes,” she said.

“Yeah?”

There was a tangle of words on the tip of her tongue which made no sense at all. Natasha pictured herself stomping on them till they liquefied. “Thanks for this morning, for backing me up in the DoD meeting. It was you who persuaded Steve really.”

“No, the safeguards he wanted were all you.” He smiled at her again, the sharp, wicked grin he’d flash at her sometimes that made her feel conspiratorial and warm. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Natasha said.

+++

They had coffee. Tentative, a little awkward, smiling too much and talking too little. Just coffee. It was a first.

Maybe you’re imagining all this! Natasha had said to herself encouragingly. Maybe it’s all – leftovers. Just stuff hanging around. Maybe you’re going to get in there and realise that he’s really dull and it’ll all be over in two weeks. Maybe he’ll realise he doesn’t like you in the least, and it’s just superficial physical attraction. That’d solve your problems, wouldn’t it?

+++

She did so hate being afraid.

+++

They had coffee again the next day, and the day after that.

+++

“It’s not that it matters,” she told her reflection that Saturday night. She had about half an hour to go before she could wash the paste out of her hair and admire her new highlights, and though she was theoretically reading a book her mind kept sliding off in directions she didn’t want it going in – the way he’d looked on the airfield yesterday morning, with his sunglasses glinting in the light and the wind whipping his hair into a tousle and that dreadful smile, the nearly-not-there one, when he’d seen her, as if he wasn’t quite sure yet that he was allowed to be openly glad of her presence. “Oh-by-the-way-I-know-you-don’t-remember-but. You’d murder anyone who did that to you. You’d never trust them again.”

Angry at herself, Natasha dropped onto the toilet seat lid and picked up her book again, began reading out loud; that forced her concentration to the page, and before long she was all caught up in the story the way she wanted to be, all her annoying emotions quieted.

It wasn’t till she was in bed, lying on her back in the dark, snuggled into the comfortable mattress, that it all came back – those awful five minutes before you dropped off, when there was nothing left to distract from that thing you’d done, the way you – oh fuck. Even in the confines of her own mind he made her a tongue-tied adolescent. Why on earth had she let him – had she let herself. The bed was big and warm and empty and didn’t hold any answers at all, not one. No more narrow bunk beds for Natasha Romanov… sometimes she wondered what it would be like to have him in the bed with her again, to have a warm body to press against, a heavy thigh across her own, that deep voice murmuring good night, that kissable mouth close enough to actually kiss. His left arm was body-warm, the fingers roughened; what would they feel like on her skin, contrasted with his calloused right hand? Time could grind your memories down as effectively as the chair, and taken together they had made her unsure, sometimes, that she and he had ever –

Sleepy grey eyes and that solid chest to lie on – she’d seen him shirtless once or twice in the med bay, knew he had chest hair now, that the join of his left arm and shoulder was still deeply scarred, that his abs and Adonis belt were a miracle. The things they could do together… go slow, she’d promised herself. Be careful. And after all, she was lying to him.

Well, a voice inside her head pointed out. There’s one obvious way to fix that.

+++

Him being angry with her made her defensive, him being distant with her hurt, him looking at other girls made her indignant, him being hurt by her sent her into paroxysms of guilt, him being unfathomable made her want to tear him open and climb inside him and examine everything he was until she knew him as well as she knew herself.

Him not being with her made her ache. She was older than she usually ever cared to remember and goddammit she was sick of feeling like an adolescent with a passing crush; it had passed once, sort of, but apparently it was back and here to stay.

 _Damn_ the man.

+++

His front door was painted an uninspiring grey. The whole apartment building was uninspiring, really, but it was quiet and secure and had an aura of unobtrusive well-off-ness. It was bad manners to wonder where he’d got the money from, but she hoped he’d stolen it from someone who deserved to be left penniless. This was a hell of a step up from the dingy little place in Bucharest, at any rate. Had the last seven decades turned him into as much of a secret hedonist as she was?

When Barnes opened the door he had the most adorable bedhead. His eyes were a little puffy and bruised with sleep, and the thin Henley he wore did nothing at all to hide the breadth of his shoulders and the strength of his upper body. Natasha nearly licked her lips.

“Morning,” she said, like an idiot.

“Morning!” he said. “Are you OK? What do you need?”

“A clue bat,” she said before she could stop herself, “to the back of the head. Several times over.”

“Huh?” He squinted at her. “Look, uh. Come in, have some coffee, I’ll just, I’ll get dressed and we can go –”

Oh god, he was even more endearing half asleep than properly awake. She’d never noticed that before. “No,” Natasha said. “No no no, it’s not an emergency, it’s, nothing’s wrong.”

Bucky waved his hands helplessly. “You tracked me down and came all the way out here at three in the morning because _nothing’s wrong_? Seriously, Romanov, you are the most –”

Too late she remembered that officially she didn’t know where he lived, because he’d put a PO box on all the files at the compound. Her face was flaming.

“It’s not like that,” she said. “I, look, it.” She drew a long breath. Her hands ached, she was wringing them so tightly. “Damn.” If you’re going through hell, keep going. There was only one way to do it, and that was to blurt it out and – oh fuck – hope. “We’ve done this before.”

“ _What_ ,” Bucky said.

“I have been trying,” Natasha said. “I have been trying really hard, I promised myself, no complications, get your act together Romanov, and I was not expecting –”

“Not even a _little_?” His voice rose in disbelief.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” he said, eyes narrowed angrily, “that you’re being absolutely insulting. Not expecting, my ass, what do you think this was, some nice little diversion I just felt like picking up again to pass the damn time –”

But that was too much. Natasha gathered up all her courage, took two steps forwards, caught his elbows and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss him.

His stubble scratched, but his lips were astonishingly soft and hot, parted and pliant under her own; her heartbeat was thudding in her own ears, and she was trembling with nervousness when she dropped back onto her heels to look at him. His eyes were wide and surprised. Yes, that was definitely a blush. Definitely. Natasha’s heart was hammering in her throat.

Slowly the left side of his mouth curled up. Then he caught her elbows in turn and bent and kissed her, and the hallway and his apartment and all the world went up in flames, oh god, he wrapped his arm across her shoulders and kissed her till she was dizzy, little flicks of his tongue, a gentle bite at her lower lip, working out all over again what she liked, what made her gasp and moan. She felt like an awkward teenager trying to respond, overwhelmed and breathless and clumsy, pressing herself against his body, reaching up for that lovely tempting mouth. It was so familiar, so new, the texture of his mouth, the way his lips slid against hers; so deliciously _right_. When the kiss broke her knees were jelly.

Bucky didn’t let her go. “So,” he murmured. Their faces were inches apart, if he tilted his head just a bit their noses would brush. His breath was hot on her skin, her wet mouth. “Forget coffee. Can I take you out?”

Natasha caught her breath. Her arms were tucked between her body and his, her hands curled on his broad warm chest, she was on her tiptoes again, and his arms were big and hot and strong, holding her steady. Nervousness and incoherence had dried up and fled, so that for the first time in weeks that hot gaze made her feel like herself, instead of an inarticulate fool. “I think you’d better.”

Wicked little curl of his mouth, his eyes hooded. He ran his hands down her back leisurely, stopping much too decorously just above the waistband of her pants. For the first time in forever she wanted someone to grope her ass. “Yeah?”

“My reputation’s in ruins,” she said solemnly. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Well you’d better come inside and have some breakfast,” he said. “There’s somewhere I’d like to take you once the sun comes up.”

“I’d like that,” Natasha said. Oh she could have looked at his smile for the rest of the night.

Kissing him, however, was even more satisfying.

+++

Six hours later Natasha was standing on top of the Statue of Liberty, watching Manhattan glow gold in the morning sunlight.

“You remembered a passing remark about how I’ve never been up here for weeks?” she said, burrowing into Bucky’s side; his arm was over her shoulders, and they were both holding on to their coffees for dear life. They’d spent all night in his kitchen talking. Mostly talking.

“Eh,” he said. “How long have you known where I live?” Rather slyly.

“It was a security concern,” she said primly, looking away to hide her smile.

He started laughing, low and scratchy, and kissed her temple.

+++

“You absolutely panicked me in that elevator.”

“Yeah?” He was surprised.

“Mm-hmm. I couldn’t tell which way was up.” She was smiling. “I don’t think anybody’s ever asked me out before.”

“Come on!”

“As me,” Natasha said. “Nobody’s ever asked Natasha Romanov out before. When I worked for SHIELD I used to go out, and meet people, and go on dates. But _they_ always met Natalie. Or Nancy. Or Nadine. Or Nikita once but that was a mistake, I hadn’t seen the movie.” She lifted her shoulder in a shrug. “But at SHIELD I was always. You know, The Black Widow. Crazy Russian femme fatale who killed her sex partners and ate them. And the one time I screwed myself up to asking someone, he said I wasn’t worth it. I’ve been worrying about this so long it didn’t even occur to me you’d beat me to the punch.” She was gazing into the middle distance, smiling softly, her eyes bright despite the dark circles underneath them, and there was a strange soft note in her voice that he loved. “You always tie me in knots.”

Bucky smiled. “Sorry. But I couldn’t…” he paused, searching for the right word. This fragile new beginning would not bear the weight of grandiose declarations, and shouldn’t have to; whatever came of it, here, now, holding her, hearing her voice, he was happy. “Wait, I guess.”

“Good,” she said.

+++

By the time they got back to Brooklyn Natasha was yawning her pretty head off every few minutes, and Bucky could feel her swaying with tiredness under his arm as they walked. Her soft strong body against his made him hot all over whenever he let himself think about it too long, and god he loved turning his head and getting a face full of windblown red hair. She’d put highlights into it, shining gold carefully woven through her curls.

“Let me take you home,” he said. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

“Not a wink,” she admitted. “I had some important things to work through.” She tilted her head back and squinted at him, smiling.

Something in him was bubbling over with joy; his head was full of sunshine and canopies of trees against the blue summer sky over his head and the sound of sun-flecked swift-flowing mountain streams – all things bright and beautiful, as some hymn or other said, and most of them probably imaginary. Bucky leaned over and kissed her. Natasha curled her hands into his jacket, and when he drew back she promptly yawned into his face.

God he adored her. She was so easy to be with, all kindness and courage and that dry, wicked sense of humour. And she _wanted_ him. He had zero right to throw stones about forgetting to mention certain details of their relationship; the fact that she’d come to him was everything, meant everything. He was going to take her dancing, he decided, and to that exhibition she so obviously wanted to see, and to a baseball game, and... She was laughing now, her head buried in his shoulder, little hiccupping noises as she tried not to be loud.

“Come on,” he said, loving her hot weight against him, the smell of her hair. “Where are we headed?”

Natasha had a lovely old apartment with tall ceilings and wooden floors; furniture was at a minimum but books were not. Bucky’s heart leapt for joy when she pulled him inside: her space, her privacy, and she wanted him in it. She kicked off her shoes at the front door and led him round the place, laughing, kitchen, bathroom, the sunny, empty living room with its couch and its bookshelves. Bucky ran his fingers over the spines of the books nearest him: a higgledy-piggledy collection of new and second-hand copies, classics, contemporary novels, history books, collections of journalism. A row of Loebs that made him smile; he wondered if she’d got round to learning Ancient Greek yet. On the very bottom shelf of the bookshelf by the window there was a pile of writing about Russia and the Cold War, silent confirmation of his suspicions about her own favourite fake career. It was exactly the sort of thing she would find funny. He thought he recognised in her collection the same need that had driven him into every library and book shop he had passed after DC – the need for certainty, the desire to put your finger on a page and say, that’s truth, no matter what I remember. Here, at last: incontrovertible fact.

As it turned out, there were less of those in the world than most people thought. Bucky picked one of the books up and flipped through the pages – she’d written marginalia in blue biro, underlined sentences or marked them with exclamation marks.

“I liked her other one better,” he said. “Felt more balanced.”

“I’m still reading that,” she said. She was sitting on the arm of the couch, smiling at him. “It’s in the kitchen somewhere. I know what you mean though. So many of them have agendas.”

“Can’t let go of what they believe,” Bucky said thoughtfully. He straightened up and turned and smiled at her. “So, I guess I’ll leave you to sleep.” Then he promptly yawned, and Natasha laughed.

“Or you could stay.”

Bucky swallowed hard. “Yeah? Moving at the speed of sound, aren’t we?”

Funny little smile. “It’s not the Forties any more.”

“No. But you –”

“I’ve just spent weeks tying myself in knots about you in no small part because I couldn’t imagine that you would want this again,” she said dryly. “I’m not as smart as I like to pretend.”

He laughed. She stepped close and tugged at his coat; he let her slide it off his shoulders and lay it over the couch. Then she took his hands and gently pulled him into her bedroom. The bed was unmade. Bucky piled his clothes neatly on a chair near the window and didn’t look at her as she stripped. He only turned when he was in his underwear; she wore a loose t-shirt that fell halfway down her thighs, her hair a tousled mess, but when she looked at him she smiled helplessly. There was something so sweetly familiar about that smile that all Bucky’s nervousness went up in smoke at once, as if she’d taken his hand and promised him he belonged here.

“Hey.” The frank appreciation in her face made him hot. He didn’t usually waste much time thinking about his scars, except insofar as they identified him beyond any doubt, but there was no point worrying about them at all if that look was anything to go by. Bucky shifted his weight from foot to foot. Natasha laughed and came close, grey-green eyes very serious indeed. For what felt like the first time he realised she was a lot shorter than he was. Her mouth was pursed, and her strong hands touched him here and there, his waist, his chest, his elbows. Curiously she ran her hand down his left forearm, and Bucky shivered.

“Can you feel that?”

“Everything.”

“Wow.” Natasha stroked the metal again, smiling when it provoked another shiver, and reached up to touch the join of the new arm to the old shoulder. “Does that hurt?”

“No,” Bucky said. “Sometimes it sort of fizzes.”

“Fizzes?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I just bet!”

“Yeah.” His blood was pounding; it had been years since someone had touched him like this, years since she had touched him like this. Her fingers on his scars were as gentle as ever. Bucky bit his lip. She was very close; her lovely breasts were bare under the shirt, her nipples peaked, her skin soft and smelling of lotion and faintly of sweat. Long shapely legs, and a very nice ass, and the swing of her hips that for weeks now he had been telling himself not to notice… He could notice now, stare at, enjoy the sight of, as if for the first time. He could feel the bump of the scar tissue at her hip through the fabric of her shirt. Natasha was smiling, her face relaxed, that full mouth curved into a shape he wanted to kiss.

“Long time ago,” she said.

“I was a whole other person.” That made her laugh too. He leaned in and pressed his mouth to her shoulder, about where he guessed the other scar was under the shirt. She put her hand on the back of his neck and ran it up into his hair, petting him.

“I always want to play with your hair,” she said.

“Yeah? I like looking at yours. It’s always different. Is there a system? Do you cut it short when you’re annoyed and dye it when you’re happy?”

“No!” Her face was bright with amusement, totally open. “There isn’t any system. Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. I like to categorise things.”

“You’re the world’s worst goop,” she said.

“That’s not a very modern insult.”

“I read a lot.”

“I noticed a really tragic lack of travel writers.”

“Oh, they’re all so convinced they’ve found the wisdom of the ages just by stepping out their front doors.”

“Well, some of them,” he said fairly. “For our second date, can I take you to a bookshop?”

“Depends on the bookshop!”

“I’ll make a list.”

“Goop,” she said again. “Hey, come to bed?”

“OK,” Bucky said, smiling helplessly. “Sure.”

+++

They slept for about six hours. It was exactly as lovely as memory had assured her – his arm around her, and all that warmth, and the low husky voice by her ear. The smell of his body hadn’t stayed with her – lotion and sweat, just ordinary human musk, but she filled her lungs with it and loved it. She hadn’t remembered the sound of his breathing either. It lulled her easily into sleep, as comforting as his heartbeat under her ear.

When she woke up she was much too hot, and their legs were tangled. She was nicely trapped and _incredibly_ comfortable – the way her skin buzzed with the touch of his, his breath stirring her hair, the little movements of his body... But those were all new-old worlds to explore another time – i.e., a moment when her phone wasn’t vibrating across the nightstand.

+++

The operation involved alien tech, a Hydra cell, a corrupt Air Force general, two destroyed motorbikes (Steve’s fault), one arson incident (Sharon’s fault), and a sleepless week. Natasha and Bucky barely managed to pass in the hallway, let alone talk. The most private conversation they had in eight days was in the Quinjet; they were prepping for the drop, and she leaned over and said quietly, “Explain the sleeves?”

It had been bugging her for years.

He turned his head so his mouth was near her ear and murmured, “Fabric gets caught in the elbow sometimes.”

Natasha had to stifle something that sounded embarrassingly like a giggle. She suspected it wouldn’t have sounded so bad if his hot breath against the shell of her ear hadn’t made her shiver from head to foot. When she glanced up at him she could see him filing that information away for later use, and had to glare. He had the cheek to wink at her. She absolutely did not blush.

The only other notable happening was that Bruce turned up half an hour before the final assault with badly-needed intel and an exhausted look.

“Space vacation,” he said in answer to all queries. “Don’t ask. And don’t drink with Thor’s friends. _Ever_.”

There wasn’t time for feelings, so Natasha didn’t have any.

+++

The team had made it a habit to throw a party after a large op went down. Stark had started it, and Bucky had soon realised that the team considered them some sort of weird unspoken mutual apology project for Germany and Siberia which he did not understand in the least and probably they didn’t either. Under other circumstances it would have annoyed Bucky endlessly. He wasn’t the best at talking about his feelings – though he was better at it than Steve, not that that was a high bar – but he did have a conviction that teams like this didn’t function unless everyone was upfront with each other.

But the fact was, the Avengers _were_ functioning, somehow, and as long as that was the case _how_ they functioned was none of Bucky’s business. He was here because, now that the triggers were gone, the need to do something useful with himself, within the limited boundaries of what was possible for an infamous terrorist and exonerated POW to do at all, outweighed his hatred of violence, but as far as he was concerned this outfit was his job, not his family.

Bucky liked them fine, but he still caught himself scanning a room for Dum Dum or Dernier or Jim. The moment he remembered why they weren’t there brought an ache that time was slowly dulling, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of it just yet. Mourning for them made him feel… himself. In Bucharest he had not had enough memories of them to even be entirely sure what they meant to him; this grief was personal, entirely his. If you weren’t Bucky Barnes, you wouldn’t feel like this.

Conversely, he’d proven empirically that he would feel the same about Natasha Romanov under any circumstances, with whatever memories. The calm familiarity of it was not as important as the sense that they were starting something brand new and beautiful, and for weeks the warm little shudder he got whenever he looked at her had been a sweet, cherished secret, something Bucky gloated over: I have this back too, I can still feel this way. At first that had been enough, and then suddenly it hadn’t been… Bucky didn’t understand why people found her unknowable. All it took was patience and attention. It was her kindness that had really got under his skin: the courage it took to hand out second chances like free candy. Not many people were like that. Detached admiration of what she’d made herself in the face of everything that had been done to her had slowly again become admiration of _her_ , until one morning he’d looked up at her in the break room and found he couldn’t take his eyes off the curl of her hair against her jaw or the movement of her hands.

Then he’d known he was screwed.

Bucky leaned against the bar and watched her, under cover of pretending to watch the whole room; she was talking to Banner, smiling, hair twisted up, slinky black dress that some day, in the future, he hoped he’d again have the right to unzip and help her out of... Hold the strong body close, kiss her scarred soft skin, touch her the way she deserved to be touched; he hadn’t eaten a girl out in so long, he hoped he still remembered how. Heat and the briny taste of her slick, the soft flesh against his face, Natasha’s thighs over his shoulders, the little noises she made, stockings rubbing his skin…

Did women still wear stockings? God Bucky hoped so. He was enjoying himself contemplating the question and picturing Natasha in a variety of them when Stark appeared at his elbow and repossessed the bourbon bottle.

“Having fun?” Stark said sardonically.

Bucky glanced at him, but Stark was watching the bourbon pour into his glass. He could never quite look Bucky in the face. It made Bucky’s stomach squirm to face him squarely – he looked so much like Howard – but that was why he did it. There was a tangle of grief and guilt and anger at himself and bitterness at the world in general there that was best left permanently unexamined. He’d murdered Howard and he’d murdered Howard’s wife, and the most he could say in his own defence was _I would have stopped it if I could have_. (Stark’s face had twisted helplessly when Bucky had said that, and he’d said, “Yeah,” and though they would never be friends, they were not, at least, openly enemies.)

“It’s funny how you really notice what alcohol tastes like when it can’t get you drunk,” he said.

Stark snorted. “It must be.” He took a sip, frowned. “You handled the Hulk all right.”

“More like got out of his way.”

“I mean, no freaking out.”

“It’s not exactly the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Granted,” said Stark, “but, you know.”

Whatever that meant. Bucky said, “Banner staying?”

“That’s what I’m about to try and talk him into. Maybe Romanov’ll have more luck. Nice if they made it to a date this time.”

And with that he toasted Bucky, sarcastically, and wandered off.

 _Nice if they made it to a date this time_. They were standing in a corner by the balcony windows, Natasha and Banner, heads together, talking quietly. Bucky drew a sharp breath. Banner had never tried to kill her, he was fairly sure. And after all, they hadn’t said anything, had they? Maybe she’d thought, well, it’d be worth a try, maybe exorcise some memories, and just – she was smiling, right now, she was smiling at Banner, fond and warm. She’d been so shocked, in the elevator that evening. He knew how she operated, how she confronted the things that frightened her; maybe that was all it had ever been.

He knocked the bourbon back and turned away. Steve was serenely hustling Wilson, Lang and Van Dyne out of their beer money at the pool table. None of the poor schmucks had yet realised what he was up to. Maximoff was curled in an armchair talking to Vision; Hill had just joined them. Stark’s voice floated up to Bucky from behind him, greeting Banner. Should he leave? Anything but a scene. He would smile and tell her thanks and walk away and laugh at himself in the privacy of his own home – the home she’d been in, seen, admired, the hallway where she’d kissed him, the kitchen chair he’d sat in when she’d come round the table, her hands twisting nervously, and slid into his lap with that tight, uncertain smile –

He would have to fling the miserable bit of kindling out of the window now. She’d been white as a sheet when he’d opened the door to her. _Nobody’s ever asked me out before_. Hah. But – she’d also said – _he said I wasn’t worth it_.

Fear dissolved in fury. Had that been Banner? If he’d said that to her in so many words… Bucky breathed deep and poured himself another glass, the ritual as comforting as the alcohol would have been. He was disgusted at himself for doubting her. She’d invited him into her home – into her _bed_. Didn’t he of all people know what her privacy meant to her, how little of it she’d had before, how much trust it took to ask someone else into your home after all the years of having strangers put their filthy hands into your very mind and play with it?

Steve was frowning at him across the room. Bucky pulled a face at him, and Steve turned sharply to hide his grin; Bucky laughed.

The thing was, Bucky had always functioned pretty well without caring one way or another what most people thought of him. He liked people, but they were all nuts, and entirely different to each other, and if a girl didn’t like you, eh, another one would. Which was not to say he’d had no teenage heartbreaks, but somehow…

Someone touched his arm; he nearly jumped out of his skin. Natasha laughed at him.

“What universe did you drift off to?”

“God alone knows,” Bucky said, struggling to get himself back under control.

“What’s this – the Winter Soldier, caught off his guard?” Her solemn tone suggested some kind of quote or reference, but he didn’t recognise it, and she laughed again. “Never mind.” When she put her glass down on the bar it clinked much too loudly, and he realised she was in a temper and pretending she wasn’t.

“Is everything OK?”

Natasha reached over the bar, fetched out a bottle of wine and topped up her glass with quick, impatient movements. “Fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine. Bruce is back and he’s really very sorry for everything. And he can’t understand why I’m not. How dare I kick him off a ledge.”

“You kicked him off a ledge,” Bucky said, straight-faced.

“I needed the Hulk.”

“Oh.”

“Oh god, I don’t even know what we talked about. And then Tony turned up and suddenly it was all, you know, the Accords how dare, and what am I doing with a seat on the AOC –”

“You’re the only person everyone _trusts_ with a seat on the oversight committee,” Bucky said, though admittedly he was somewhat biased. “Are… you a little drunk?” He had never, ever seen her drunk before.

“Only a little? I should work on that.” She finished her wine in three quick gulps, head tipped back, the muscles in her throat sliding under her skin. Bucky wanted to touch that slender neck, kiss the soft skin till she sighed and smiled, relaxed and happy again as she had been that day the other week, waking up in his arms.

“Natasha –”

“No, I’m sorry.” She gave herself a shake and put her hand on his arm. Her touch was warm through the fabric of his sleeve. “I _am_ drunk. And I’m in a temper, which has nothing to do with you, and we haven’t talked in a week and this is a sucky second date.”

“Are there any bookshops still open?” he wondered, and she laughed out loud, leaning close to him. Bucky leaned in too, ready to steady her if she was woozier than she seemed.

“If you’re hungry,” Natasha said, smiling face turned up to his, “I know a burger place.”

“My girl,” Bucky said cheerfully, “I’m always hungry.” If he bent down just a bit…

Natasha tucked her hair behind her ear. Her other hand still rested on his arm. “I thought you might be. Metabolism.”

“Yeah, it’s not very consistent,” Bucky said. “I can go longer without than other people, but when it catches up to me I have to stuff myself.” He grinned at her.

“Well, let me take you for some really good chilli cheese fries.”

“I’d like that.” He offered her his arm, and she curled her fingers in his elbow and transferred her weight from the bar to him, a tiny, stupid, trusting gesture right out here in the open that made him fizzy with joy, and then Steve said from just behind him, “Uh, Buck, we’ve got a problem,” and the chilli cheese fries were a no-show.

+++

 _It’s probably nothing_ , Steve had said, _just a milk run, just in case_ , but they weren’t back two days later and apparently it wasn’t a milk run, though no, thanks Nat, they didn’t need back up.

Natasha could have screamed. She wasn’t particularly worried about either of them, but dear god did she want to be out there doing something useful, instead of sitting in New York attending debrief meetings with the oversight committee and avoiding Bruce.

Dear idiot, she thought fondly. Floats back in here years later and long after the end of the world as he had known it and decides to – what? Pick back up where he’d left off? She didn’t know; she was fairly sure _he_ didn’t know, either. The sceptical look he’d given her at the party when she’d deflected his concern had royally pissed her off at the time _._ She wasn’t after some – some tragic impossible romance; she had promised herself that she would try and be _happy_ , as well as useful…

Natasha was prepared to admit – to herself – that she had a type: the dichotomy between what Bruce was capable of and the way he chose, tried, wanted to be was there in Bucky too, just as in herself. But it was Bucky who wanted her back and was prepared to take whatever risks went with that; Bucky who had once shrugged when she’d called herself a monster, _yeah, so?_ and merely asked if she wanted another beer; Bucky who’d screwed his courage to the sticking-point and asked her out and not held himself back from being normal, being loved.

Maybe the difference was that Bucky had always been a soldier. With the triggers gone, his skills were his own, and he wasn’t ashamed or afraid of them – only of what others had forced him to do with them. He disliked violence, and he went out of his way to avoid it when he could, but god, the courage that man had, not to run away from what had been done to him, to turn it back on Hydra and do something good with it… Even before the triggers were wiped: he’d gone to Siberia because he thought Zemo would hurt others unless he was stopped.

Really, she should have known all along, right from the first moment she got a sense of Steve Rogers’ character.

Really, this was ridiculous. The point was, her stomach did funny somersaults of glee when Bucky smiled at her, and she wanted to be near him so she could enjoy it.

Natasha flung herself into bed early that night and indulged in some extravagant fantasies that featured those strong hands and the broad shoulders and solid chest and thighs and that wicked, kissable mouth in starring roles: some blank hotel room, the easy way he lifted her up against the wall, the way he bit his mouth as he looked down at her, hot eyes fixed on her thighs as she spread them, welcoming him; the heat of him inside her, opening her, owning her, giving himself to her; his voice in her ear, roughened with the effort of keeping quiet, rasping her name as she fell apart, safe in his arms… When she dropped off she was sated and more relaxed than she’d been in days.

On the fifth day, when he and Steve said they were headed back at last, the funny somersaults came back with a vengeance, and Natasha packed up early and went home to daydream, feeling giddy as a girl. Second date! There was the bookshop plan. What about traditional date activities, like dinner and shows and cinemas and suchlike? Natasha wasn’t opposed; in fact she was pretty neutral on all. Dinner, eh. A show, eh. Depended which one… Dancing. She grinned to herself.

She couldn’t be sure what sort of thing Bucky would like – or expect? – date-wise. Did he go to the cinema? Years later, Steve was still fascinated by modern special effects and animations; this, Natasha suspected, had a lot to do with his interest in art. She wasn’t sure Bucky would share it. Taking her to the Statue of Liberty was such a cheesy thing to do, but it had that touch of something personal because he had remembered she had never been up there, and thought she’d enjoy it… she’d been racking her brains for ages trying to think of something like that that he would enjoy. He liked science and science fiction; he had a hell of a head for numbers, and an intriguing interest in architecture and history, and he had once admitted, laughingly, to a fascination for ghost stories, but whether or not these interests were easily transmuted into dates Natasha was as yet unsure. Research was called for. This damn date was going to be perfect, down to the last fraction of a second of it.

There was time to plan something good. Bucky had just come back from a mission. She knew perfectly well that he was going to spend the next couple of days being tired and out of sorts and hungry all the time…

Inspiration struck.

Natasha hadn’t seen much of the apartment when she’d come over the other week. It was clean and it was roomy and he had as many books as she did, though she was interested to note that many of them were crumbling old second-hand editions of novels she’d never heard of, as if he’d set out to pick up from where he’d left off and read his way through the subsequent seventy years of literature. His Cold War histories were stacked in a plastic box, rather than on the shelves, suggesting perhaps that he didn’t want to look at them but couldn’t bring himself to throw them out.

Poking her head into his bedroom would definitely have been taking things too far. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, one hand on the back of the chair he’d been sitting in that night, she wondered suddenly if this was a really bad idea – after all, Steve – and god knew Bucky valued his privacy, and she had no right to disrespect that. But she wanted to do something for him, and she knew how much he ate and how cranky he was after missions. They had never been very good at keeping secrets from one another, though Bucky rarely let the others see how he was feeling. No, she was here and she was going to see her plan through.

Bucky didn’t have an extensive collection of cooking utensils, but there was more than enough to make pasta, cook a rich Bolognese sauce – enough for two, because Steve. Natasha washed up in triumph, and put the food in the fridge, and resolutely let herself out of the apartment, having swapped one of his mysteries for one of hers, and left it on the kitchen table. He would recognise it, she was sure, as the one she’d had on her bedside table that day…

And soon she would see him in person. That wicked, hidden smile, and the way his pale eyes went soft when he looked at her, and kissing – warm and wet and intimate, remembering how to give another person pleasure, how his breathing quickened, how she felt his heart hammering under her palm when she put her hand on his chest to steady herself, how the heat of it had swept over her and left her caught in that strange mood between languid contentment and eagerness for more, whatever more might look like, now that they had all the time and privacy in the world to do whatever they wanted together.

One day – one day soon – she would find out. Natasha shivered deliciously, smiling to herself.

+++

“My god that was a grudge and a half,” Steve said in the elevator, and promptly yawned into his elbow. They were listing against each other like drunken sailors, their bags at their feet.

“Mighta known he wasn’t dead,” Bucky said, slurring his words with tiredness. His stomach had been grumbling complaints about the inadequacy of field rations since they got off the jet.

“We dropped a castle on him in 1944,” said Steve gloomily.

Bucky sniggered. “Yeah, but look at _us_.”

“I s’pose if they died when they were supposed to they wouldn’t be _super_ villains.”

“Hah.” The elevator halted at Bucky’s floor, and he kicked his duffle across the space and through into the corridor. “I’ll debrief –”

“No, I’ll debrief.” Steve yawned again, even more hugely than last time. Bucky swore he heard his jaw crack, and said so. Steve flipped him the bird fondly. “Catch some sleep.”

“Sez you,” Bucky said cheerfully. “Hey let’s go play baseball sometime soon.”

Steve’s tired face brightened up. “You’re on. This weekend?”

“Perfect. See you tomorrow.”

Steve threw him a two-fingered salute. He’d be round after his run in the morning, wanting coffee and bacon and eggs, and Bucky would throw the bacon at him and crawl onto the couch and doze off with his nose in a book, waiting to be catered to, same as most mornings. The question was, was he exhausted now, or could he stay awake long enough to cook and eat something?

When he unlocked the apartment door the place smelled beautifully of Bolognese sauce. Bucky groaned – had he left some window open? Nah. Closed all round. He stumbled into the kitchen – there was a book on the table he didn’t remember leaving there – noted in surprise that there was a neat stack of clean pans on the sideboard that, again, he didn’t remember leaving there – opened the fridge, and found an angel had been at work.

A red-headed one, if he was any judge, five foot something and with a right hook like an iron bar. Bucky slumped against the fridge and grinned at those Tupperware containers like the Koh-i-Noor or the Hope Diamond was in there somewhere instead of enough pasta and sauce to feed a small army.

God, he was head over heels.

+++

Natasha woke up because the mattress had dipped. She held very still, careful not to change her breathing; she could smell coffee and something musky that might be a man’s aftershave. Her fingers twitched, creeping towards the second pillow, underneath which a knife rested; then warm fingers stroked her hair out of her face, and someone kissed her temple.

“Feeling suicidal?” she groused, hiding her smile in the pillow. He always woke her like this, soft kisses, playing with her hair.

“You made me dinner.” All husky self-satisfaction. Heat shivered through her. She wriggled around and looked up. He was gorgeous in the morning sunlight; it picked out highlights in his thick hair both grey and gold, and made his eyes shine, and that smile he wore put those somersaults in her stomach again as she sat up, smiling.

“Hey, you’re back.” Inane. Natasha didn’t care. Better to put her hands on his face and pull him in for a kiss, soft and lingering, trying to pull up years old memories of how he liked to be kissed.

He hadn’t forgotten how she did. Pressure and heat and a nip at her bottom lip that made her gasp; he kissed her, drew back, kissed her again, sweet little kisses like he couldn’t bring himself to pull away too far. Natasha drew her knees up and snuggled close to him as best she could, feeling the soft wool of his sweater under her palms, the hard muscle underneath that, smiling against his mouth.

“Thank you for looking after me.”

“Thank you for the coffee.” Teasingly formal.

“Are you a pancakes sort of person?”

“I might be if you’re making them.” She bit her lip.

“Yay,” Bucky said. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her face; it was very flattering. “Then I’ll make them.” He couldn’t stop smiling either.

+++

Bucky had had some vague idea of sitting her down at the table and waiting on her hand and foot, but of course that wasn’t Natasha’s temperament, particularly. She kept sticking her fingers in the pancake batter and flipping the bacon rashers in the pan and generally being within arm’s reach and helping with the cooking, which, on the one hand, meant that his grand gesture wasn’t turning out as romantic as he’d pictured, but on the other hand meant that she was always close enough to kiss.

By far the better outcome. It had always made him quietly crazy to remember that this laughing, gentle girl in her pyjama shorts, this smiling lass with the soft skin and warm curves and sweet eager kisses, was also about the only other killer on the planet as deadly and as ruthless as himself. She’d asked him into her apartment and taken her uniform off and shown him this because she wanted him to see it, and because apparently him seeing it made her happy, and that made Bucky dizzy and stupid and hot with sheer, naked, suppressed lust.

The pyjama shorts were _short_ , and he was trying really hard not to notice that underneath the t-shirt and the thin cardigan she’d flung on she was not wearing a brassiere. Bra. They just called them bras these days. He’d been doing so well at, at keeping himself under control; _go slow_ , she’d said, remembering, he supposed, the old desperation to touch each other, not to waste a second of their precious time together, and so Bucky had never assumed and tried not to remember, except when he was alone sometimes. Eating at the table was the worst, because she was opposite him, and if he glanced up from his plate he couldn’t seem to avoid –

Natasha was grinning at him. “See something you like?”

Bucky dropped his fork and sat back in his chair, staring off to the side, his face burning.

“I’ve been looking at your ass all morning,” she added.

He glanced at her. “Yeah? I didn’t know it was noteworthy.”

“Oh it _is_. No one ever tell you that before?”

“I cannot honestly claim that it ever came up with anyone I dated before falling, no.” He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself grinning.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t necessarily have said that sort of thing out loud.”

“Well,” Bucky said fairly. “Not to a fella’s face, I guess. Steve’s got some stories about the kind of things the USO girls used to talk about…”

Natasha looked delighted. “He _does_? I have to hear this. Can we get him drunk?”

“Probably not,” Bucky said. “He doesn’t get shitfaced in public.”

“I’m not public, I’m his friend.” She grinned again. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure!”

“When would – I mean, if I said that.” She stopped. A wave of red was crashing over her face from her jawline to her hair. “Damn. You know, you make me very inarticulate.”

“You make me drunk,” Bucky said. “All lightheaded and bouncing off the walls.”

Natasha smiled. “Are we still taking this slow?”

“Huh?” Bucky said.

She gestured with her coffee mug. He guessed it made her feel better to be holding something in her hand. “This. Uh, us. Uh. Just. Are we going slow?”

“Oh! Hey, I _am_ from the Forties, you know.” He grinned at her. “I can do slow.”

“Yeah?”

“A crawl.”

“Snail’s pace.”

“That kind of shuffle that you do when you’re balancing on a beam, you know, half a foot forward, then the other foot half a foot forward –”

He’d made her laugh again. She’d just opened her mouth to say something when both of their phones started ringing.

+++

“What do you mean, telekinetic,” said Bucky. “She’s from Queens! She’s barely seventeen! Nobody’s ever strapped _her_ to a lab table and scrambled her DNA into breakfast food! How is she telekinetic!”

“Well I mean I got bitten by a radioactive spider on a school trip,” said Parker. 

“Yeah, but your messed-up luck is exclusive to you,” said Bucky.

“Ouch,” said Parker, and shuffled his feet.

“Oh don’t mope,” said Bucky. “Steve would not be the man he is today if he hadn’t spent all that time throwing up on the Cyclone when we were teenagers.”

Stark’s head came up like a dog that had heard a whistle; Wilson stifled a snigger; Maximoff’s jaw dropped.

Steve put his feet on the table and said serenely, “Hey, remember Christmas ‘35?”

“Through a drunken haze,” Bucky said reminiscently.

“Cause I’m pretty sure you passing out –”

“Not till after you punched that cop.”

“How was I supposed to know what his day job was,” said Steve, disgruntled.

+++

After that, it was an alien artefact giving everyone nightmares; in the case of the scumbags who had bought it off a group of Hydra operatives, it had actually driven them to murder each other, which lent a certain urgency to their efforts to first recover and then get rid of the thing.

“I think it’s almost sentient,” Natasha said. “But only almost. The nightmares are its way of defending itself. And notice the difference between these nightmares and what Wanda does when she attacks someone telepathically. Nothing it’s done has been specific to any of us – it’s just been generically awful existential dread and horror.”

So totally generic, in fact, that she’d been the first to notice something was going on. Natasha’s nightmares, when she had them, were usually quite specific and did not involve being inefficiently chased through indistinct dark tunnels by a giant slavering monster that looked like an impossible cross between a wolf and a bald eagle. She’d had plenty of pointless and ridiculous dreams, but even the most absurd were produced and shaped by your own brain and experiences. That one had taken the biscuit.

When she had asked Bucky about it he’d looked surprised and said he’d assumed his was the ignoble return of some mud-monster thing he’d dreamed about as a small boy that had had him avoiding puddles for weeks.

“But nobody’s touched it!” said Tony, glowering through the lab window at the thing on the table – it had been left next to Bruce’s laptop, a teetering pile of print-outs, a tube of Smarties and a half-empty coffee cup which, two days after they’d put the room on lock-down, was probably growing mould.

“Oh use your brains.” Natasha huffed. “It’s projecting somehow. We’ve had it locked up in a chest in an underground storage facility since the Second World War. I’d be pissed too.”

“Well, we got other expert opinions for that kinda thing,” Tony said dryly. “But if you’re right and it _is_ deliberate, it’s very effective. I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours. If my eye ever falls upon the colour purple again, I’ll have a fit. Much more of this and it’ll be a cakewalk, because we’ll all have fallen over where we stand and started snoring, nightmares or no nightmares.”

“Purple?” Natasha said.

Tony shuddered. “Don’t ask.”

+++

Thor had just left with the nightmare dispensing artefact, and Bucky had just turned to Natasha with a question on the tip of his tongue about dinner and a night in, when Parker came skidding round the corner of the building sweaty and red-faced, nearly barrelled headlong into Clint, pulled himself up short and said, “Uh, hi, guys, everyone’s here, yay, did not realise that, uh, does anyone here know anything about _goblins_?”

+++

All things considered, they’d had better weeks. No second (third?) date had as yet been possible; Natasha and Bucky were reduced to quick touches and smiles in passing, silly coded gestures meaning _I miss you_ and _I wish we could get out of here_ , and snatched whispered conversations on jets and in the back of briefing rooms and, in this case, ambulances.

“Tell me something,” Natasha said.

“Hmm?” Bucky wound the bandage around her left hand again, eyebrow raised. “What?”

“What made you ask me out?”

He laughed. “I got bored with myself, sitting around doing nothing but daydreaming.”

She shook her head, smiling. “Sure you did.”

“I used to be good at this,” he said seriously. “I used to be able to go up to a girl I liked and ask her out.” He shrugged one-shouldered. “So in a way, even if you’d said no, just getting the words out would have been a win. Why?”

“I kept wondering,” she said. “Am I getting to know him because I want to or because he might still be a dangerous liability?”

Bucky laughed. “Both?”

“It doesn’t bother you at all, does it?”

He met her eyes, mouth a little pursed. “Not really. You’d probably be the first one I’d drop, besides Steve. You know how I think.”

“ _Try_ to drop.” She grinned. He did too.

“Let’s train again some time.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “I think I’ve missed that.”

“I think I have.” He took her sore hands in his and kissed them just before another building collapsed across the square.

+++

“Alternate universes,” Natasha and Bucky said in almost perfect unison.

“Like on Star Trek?” Bucky added.

“Unbelievable,” Natasha said. “Oh, I’ve never done my hair like that. It looks great.”

“Thanks,” her counterpart said cheerfully. “I’m really sorry to drag you guys into this. As far as we can tell, Lukin first used the stone around the time Department X was shut down to escape into an alternate universe – this alternate universe – to hide here. There’s a decent chance that his counterpart here either doesn’t exist or –”

“Is already dead,” Bucky said.

“Yeah?” his counterpart said.

“Uh, yeah.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers.

Natasha’s counterpart heaved a mournful sigh. “What a wasted opportunity.”

“You’re a bloodthirsty nutjob,” Bucky’s counterpart said fondly. They were standing on opposite sides the screen that showed Lukin’s photograph, the room crowded with Avengers, and when they looked each other it was as intimate as walking in on them kissing: you could see the love and belonging from a mile away.

Tony made a noise as if someone had poked him with a cattle prod. Bruce was staring. Steve looked, smugly, as if he’d won a bet with himself.

Natasha bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smirking.

Half an hour later, in the elevator, her counterpart said, “So, you two –”

“It’ll be a miracle if we ever get the time for a second date,” Natasha said.

“Oh, I _know_ ,” her counterpart said. “But it’ll be worth it, don’t worry. Having him back after all this time…” She sighed happily.

“Oh, I _know_ ,” Natasha said.

+++

Having him back, after all this time.

Natasha had always considered it was pretty fucked up of her to enjoy this job she did: the lies and the violence. She had never quite managed to admit to it to any shrink she’d ever been sent to – she’d known her fair share of sadists and she was not particularly worried that she might be one. She knew that there had been times when a part of her had needed the violence, in a way. Before Clint had brought her in she’d been a desolate, furious, rudderless mess, and while it was hardly true that she had, as Bucky had put it, no other marketable skills, it was certainly true that being The Black Widow had given her an outlet for all of that pain that no other choice she’d had at that time could have done.

That was part of it, the red in her ledger – maybe, even, the biggest part of all. People had been trying to tell her that she was not culpable for what the KGB had made her do for years and years, but aside from the fact that this was the kind of hair-splitting justification that didn’t just make monsters but kept them that way, the months she’d spent killing to dull her own pain could never be excused or explained or exonerated. She was what she was: the best she could do was make sure the ends this violence served were good ones.

Bucky would understand, if she were ever to say any of that out loud. Of course, with Bucky, she didn’t have to. Every choice he made showed that. And with Bucky back, she did damn well enjoy this job. He admired her skills and he never hesitated to let her know and god it was fucked up that, occasionally, she let herself show off, a little, for him. His presence changed nothing, and yet changed everything: she felt as if, with him here, she had a fixed point to lean on in all the bloody chaos of their work.

They were on a bus in Kazakhstan when she leant against his shoulder and said, “Important question…”

“No, I don’t snore.”

Natasha laughed. “Sometimes you do.” She didn’t know where that had come from, but she knew it was true. “I know you hate this job.”

Bucky twitched. “It’s not really that straightforward.”

“All right, pedant. You hate it because you had another life and you can’t ever go back to it, and because it terrifies you how good you are at it.”

“I hate this job,” Bucky said, “because it’s never been a choice and I fucking resent that. Occasionally I’ve stooped to resenting my best friend for being so determined to get blood on his hands that he argues his way into a science experiment when I would’ve given my left arm to have the list of excuses he had not to go to war. Why?”

“Do you ever enjoy it?”

Bucky drummed his fingers on the armrest of the seat. “Yes,” he said. “Do you?”

Natasha squeezed his left hand in both of hers. “Yes.”

“You’re a piece of work, lisichka,” he said softly. “You make everything bearable.”

“I missed you, my star. I missed you so much.”

(“Did you have a fight or something when you turned the comms off,” Steve asked later, and Natasha said cheerfully, “Nah, we were making out.”

“Gross,” said Steve, deliberately childish.)

+++

“This is an incredibly uncomfortable way to die,” Bucky said irritably. The tables had not, apparently, been attached to the floor of the bunker, because a fresh wave of water knocked them sideways and sent one of them spinning across the room to almost hit him. Natasha grabbed at it, but there wasn’t much hope of keeping it steady enough to stand on. The water was up to his knees already, and halfway up her thighs.

“We’re not dying here,” she said, annoyed. “There’s a show I wanted you to take me to and I am _not_ exchanging a second date for a watery death.”

“I can’t actually remember a word of Hamlet right now but I’m sure there’s an Ophelia joke I could make here somewhere.”

“Don’t you ever turn that off,” she said, exasperated. Her wet hair was plastered to her face and neck, and her lips were turning blue with the cold; she was frowning up at him and hugging herself, and Bucky crowded her into the corner of the room and lifted her so she could wrap her legs around his waist.

“Try not to,” he said. “Easier than telling the truth.”

She put her hands on his face, smiling at last. “I get it.”

“I know you do.” Bucky smiled back at her. “For the record, I’m not really worried about drowning in this death trap.”

“Me either,” she admitted. “The others are on their way and Wanda can break this place apart with a look. Hypothermia, now…”

He grinned. “I’ll –”

“Don’t even _think_ it!”

“Hey, you set yourself up for it!”

+++

Shivering under piles of blankets in the quinjet on the way back, with Steve hovering over both of them and Clint forcing a string of hot drinks on Natasha that she accepted with unusual meekness, Bucky was about to drift off happily against Steve’s shoulder when up in the cockpit Wilson said, “There’s a _what_ rampaging through the Coney Island theme park?”

+++

Parker was grounded for the rest of his natural life. Lang _deserved_ to be grounded for the rest of his natural life, but Cassie was coming to visit again next week and the kid was too distressingly cute to disappoint.

+++

When Loki showed up with someone called the Enchantress in tow three days later Natasha honestly thought she might start crying.

“What did we do?” she said despairingly.

“Huh?” Bucky said.

“Us. The Avengers. What are we being karmically punished for? I haven’t talked to you about anything other than a mission in nearly a month.”

Bucky frowned. “It can’t be a month.” Oh god, that little crease between his eyebrows was adorable. He actually counted the weeks off on his fingers. “Damn.”

“All I want,” Natasha said, “is a second date. And if I don’t get it sometime soon, I am going to make someone _suffer_.”

+++

The day after that, Nick showed up with a case file and a merciless glint in his eye, which provided Natasha with the opportunity to take her feelings out on him – at length – and send him to Coulson so everybody could go home and get some sleep.

No one, except Nick, argued, and even Nick didn’t argue that much. It was, presumably, getting obvious how much they’d had going on recently. Down in the parking lot, Steve flung his jacket into the back seat of his car and dug into his jeans pockets looking for the keys; for a moment Natasha watched him, head tipped to the side. Then, when Bucky joined him, she made up her mind.

Steve squinted at her suspiciously.

“Carry on,” she said, taking unobtrusive but irrefutable possession of Bucky’s arm. “I’ll send him back unharmed in the morning.”

Steve looked at her hands on Bucky’s elbow; then up at her face; then over at Bucky. “Have fun,” he said, and grinned.

+++

“Molasses,” Bucky said in the car.

“Hmm?” Natasha glanced over at him.

“You and me. Slow like molasses.”

“Oh. Yeah. Don’t get your hopes up for today, either. I fully expect that phone to ring the minute we get through the door.”

Miracle of miracles, it didn’t. The apartment door closed behind them with a blessedly loud snick, cutting them off from the outside world, and Natasha stood in her living room, drop-kicked her duffle childishly halfway across the room and said, “O frabjous day!”

“Alice,” said Bucky, very close behind her – so close his breath stirred her hair; she shivered as she turned. In her boots she wasn’t that much shorter than he was, but somehow, just now, he was towering over her, all tired grey eyes and warm bulk, and Natasha licked her lips helplessly. His eyes followed the movement the same way he watched a target before he took a shot. The lush pink mouth was parted, his stubble dark against skin pale with tiredness.

Natasha swayed, the merest shift of her weight towards him, her hands coming up to grip his elbows the way they had that first night, when she’d gone to him to tell him –

He kissed her, and again the world went up in flames, narrowing in the space of a heartbeat to the circle of his arms, the slide of his hot mouth against her own. Natasha gasped, pressing close, close, close, parting her lips for him, shuddering at the feel of his tongue in her mouth, moaning when he bit her lower lip gently, worried it plump and swollen. How did he do this to her? From tiredness and relief to this hot need in seconds, this pounding in her blood, the gathering ache in her cunt, the growing longing for him to grope her ass with those strong hands, touch her breasts again for the first time –

She staggered backwards as Bucky half-carried her towards the bedroom, his arms tight around her, his hot mouth slanted insistently over hers; she was moaning against his lips, pulling at him, yanking at the heavy leather jacket between her aching hands and the soft scarred skin she’d barely begun to explore. Her back hit the wall by the bedroom door with a thump, and Bucky hitched her up, arms still around her shoulders, and shifted his stance and oh holy fuck, his knee pushed between hers, the heavy muscled thigh pressing her legs apart, sliding up, up – Natasha made a noise into his mouth she had forgotten she was capable of and found herself rolling her hips against his leg without the slightest inkling of shame.

He was gasping now too, quick and fierce, bracing himself against the wall with one hand as she rode his thigh, his hot kisses fierce and devastating. How long had it been since she’d last had this, known this? Sweet hot lust was crashing over her, head to foot, building low in her stomach and her cunt,  making her feel as if she were blushing all over, her stomach swooping, her hands trembling, her cunt empty and aching and growing wetter by the second, so much more intense than touching herself, while Bucky held her and kissed her and encouraged her. He was talking, his voice deep and rough and loving.

“There, sweetheart, go on, yeah, that’s it, take it, make yourself feel good.” Distantly she realised he was hard in his jeans. Did he mean for her to come like this? The haze of arousal thinned – Natasha shuddered all over, but Bucky nudged her head back with his nose against her jaw and kissed her chin and her exposed throat, stubble scratching, lavishing attentions on her that would leave marks she wanted to flaunt, oh god, imagine, everyone knowing what he’d done to her – she cried out softly, strangled little gasp, drove her hips harder against his leg, lovely hot pressure too general to really do anything, no matter how she loved the feeling of that thick thigh between her own.

Bucky laughed against her throat. “What do you need, beautiful, my fingers? Let me touch you.”

“I –” Natasha said – she was dizzy, realised she was pulling at her belt buckle, the button and zip of her jeans. “I don’t –” Don’t know; can’t think; the only thing left in her was want.

“Dreamed of you wanting me like this,” he said, and she gasped again and clutched him and kissed the clever smiling mouth as his fingers – big, huge fingers, deliciously big, lovely and hot – pushed in between her jeans and her panties, rubbing at her luxuriously slow before he caught the fabric of her knickers and pulled it aside. Oh god, oh god. She was thrashing, her forehead against his shoulder, her hands pulling his leather jacket all out of shape. Suddenly she thought, but what about him, and trailed her left hand down his chest; so that, through zipper and denim and underwear, was what his cock felt like in her hand, and yes, she was sure, she remembered this, remembered every sweet dizzy second with him. Memory and confidence came back in the same dizzy rush. His cock jumped when she rubbed at him the way he’d rubbed at her, and Bucky sucked in a breath and laughed again. “I gotta go home in these –”

“See if you ever leave my bed again.” Natasha buried her face in his neck to muffle her cries when Bucky’s heavy thumb found her clit, pressing at her in lazy circles, stroking and teasing, her hips rolling towards him and her whole body tense and straining – more – more – until –

The world fell away in pleasure, her mind sweetly empty, his body all that held her up. Heat flooded her from head to foot, and she could feel her cunt fluttering around nothing, her slick soaking her underwear. Oh. Oh wow. Slowly she came back down again, his thumb pulling aftershocks out of her when he stroked lightly at her oversensitive clit, her hot face pressed against the skin of his neck.

Then she started laughing. “You call this molasses?”

“Oh, that was then.” Bucky was laughing too. “My god you’re beautiful.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Thank you!”

“I mean it.”

Natasha softened then. “I know,” she said. Brushed her nose against his, and then kissed his pouty lower lip and the rather lovely cleft in his chin. “I know.”

Bucky sighed, soft and low, and she ran her hand down his chest again, teasing, and put her hand on his cock. He shuddered all over. She was delighted. “Are you really going to –”

“Uh, it’s been about seventy years, so probably, yeah.” He wasn’t flushed with arousal now. Well he was, but there was an edge of shame to it as well. Natasha took her hand away, ostentatiously lazy, and rubbed her fingertips over his mouth. His lips were wet with kissing.

“Come to bed first?”

“Sure,” he said, strained. Then, “Have you got anything?”

She laughed. He was holding her with one arm around her waist, and when he stepped back from the wall she wrapped her legs around his. God he was big. Applicable uses for doing the splits... And strong – he was carrying her around without any sign of effort at all. Oh hell, that was sexy. Imagine: the wall and her legs over his elbows and – well. Or no wall at all. _Fuck_. Had they done that before?

“We’re fine,” she said, shaking her head to clear it. “I’m sterile.” Short, hard words, those last two. Had he forgotten?

“Oh well, so am I,” said Bucky. “I was thinking more about the mess.”

Natasha was surprised. “You are?”

“Since Azzano,” he said, and dropped her on the bed. Natasha bounced on the mattress, laughing, her jeans undone, her body loose-limbed and relaxed and fizzing with remembered pleasure; she could have run a marathon, climbed a mountain, arm-wrestled Steve – well, or the other super-soldier who’d recently declared himself hers, and who was looking at her now with eyes very dark and hooded and not the least bit hesitant.

“Strip,” Natasha said. The word came entirely of its own volition, and part of her was a little shocked to remember she could be this demanding in bed. She’d spent such a long time – pretty much the same length of time it had taken for her memories to coalesce and solidify into something she could trust again, which said things about her relationship to her body that she wasn’t entirely sure she was prepared to examine too closely – being a mess about sex; the vulnerability and helplessness of it, chiefly. But Bucky always made her feel so good, so very, very good, and, greedy as a kid in a candy store, she wanted more, at once, here, now.

 _We have what we have while we have it_. She smiled. There was no time to waste. There never had been.

And she wanted to reciprocate, too – to give this languid pleasure back to him, know she had made him happy – her, Natasha Romanov, no one else. For so much of her life her body had been a weapon, an asset to be carefully maintained. Now, sprawled across her bed like this, light-headed with orgasm and lust, she remembered at last that sex, like dancing, gave you another perspective on it: a tool to bring someone joy. Two people, if she included herself. A gift, even. Natasha bit her lip, smiling.

Bucky grinned at her. “See something you like?”

“ _Strip_ ,” she insisted, propping herself up on her elbows. Laughing, he dropped his jacket, pulled the glove off his left hand, unbuttoned his shirt. Flash of metal at his shoulder; chest hair she wanted to rub her hands through. She was going to bite hickeys into his throat and muss his thick hair, feel those big hands on her bare skin… what would his new left hand feel like on her ass, her breasts? What would those new fingers feel like inside her? He was ogling her right back, unashamed, eyes on her spread legs, then the neckline of her shirt and the curve of her breasts. When he dropped his hands to his belt Natasha’s eyes followed, concentrating for the first time on the bulge in his pants. Lingering adolescent nervousness shivered up and died away: touch and body heat and his deep voice in her ear and how good it felt to be held when she came…

Natasha kept see-sawing back and forth between the confidence of experience and the leftover uncertainties of that confused time before she’d been sure of her memories. She only hoped he didn’t pick up on it. Serious conversations were for later. She hadn’t made love to her Soldier in more years than she cared to count and after all, you had to set priorities in life.

Bucky kicked his boots away, steadied himself with one hand on the bed as he pulled his socks off too. He was smiling at her, his face bright with glee.

“Hey,” he said, and put one knee on the bed; his belt and flies hung open, black underwear stretched across his hard-on, the fabric wet at the tip of his cock.

“Hi,” Natasha said softly.

Gentle hands took hold of her left ankle, unzipped her boot and pulled it off; it clattered loudly on the floor. He pushed his fingers under the hem of her jeans, looking for the top of her sock – she laughed.

“No good. Jeans off first.” They were much too tight for that.

“All right.” He drew her right boot off as well, ran his hands over her calves. Natasha shivered. Bucky tipped his head to the side. “I want to eat you out.”

Arousal shot through her almost brutally; she jerked with it. Breathless, she clenched her hands in the duvet and said, “I want that.”

Big hands spread her legs as he climbed on the bed, hot on her knees, her thighs, moving up and up until his thumbs rested in the crease of her body where her thighs met her torso, and his fingers were spread back against the side of her ass.

“Yeah?”

“I just said yeah.”

“Dream about the way you taste,” he said lazily. “You get so wet, you know. All the little noises you can’t keep back, way you pull on my hair and squirm about.”

She licked her lips, fascinated by the look on his face, caught and held by those pale eyes, feeling pinned into place, exposed. “Do I?”

“You know what _really_ gets me going? You could kill me like that, with your thighs round my neck. Here you are all shook up with it and asking me to go down on you, and if you wanted – snap.” Bucky bit his lip. “That’s messed up, isn’t it? But god, you’re so strong. I never thought of it like that before – like surrender – not before you, till I started picturing you above me.”

Natasha was shaking. “And you think that’s hot. That I can –”

“Mmm.” He pulled her closer, smiling, eyes on her breasts now, appreciative, wanting. “God, yeah. You having all that power, and letting me do something you’d never let anyone else do? That’s – what, Nat?”

“Let me up,” she said, scrambling up to her knees. “Don’t – come here, you idiot –” She grabbed hold of his biceps, barely registering the curve of them, the contrast, soft skin under one hand, smooth metal under the other, before she was kissing him, fierce and hot and desperate. “God. God I want you. I’ve never – but _you_ , it _turns you on_ that I’m – that I can –” She broke off, laughing unsteadily into his mouth. “Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Why aren’t _you_ afraid of _me_ ,” Bucky said. He was astonished, she could hear it in his voice. “Sweetheart –”

Natasha was still laughing. She pressed her face against his bare right shoulder, felt his big hands smooth over her back. “Call me that some more.”

“Sweetheart?”

“Everything.”

“Sweetheart,” he said for the third time. “Darling girl. Heart’s own.” Then, his voice unsteady, “My love.”

She sighed, soft and slow, clinging to him, feeling the heat of his skin through her shirt, his hard cock pressing against her stomach, and leaned up to kiss him, laughing for the joy of it. “My love,” she murmured. Her face was hot, her panties sticking to her wetly. Bucky unbuttoned her shirt with short, impatient movements. Natasha was shaking as he pulled the fabric off her, as his hands skimmed her bare back and caught her bra; snap, and it hung loose.

“Traditionally,” she said, her voice unsteady, “red-blooded American males are supposed to find those very difficult.”

Bucky grinned. “Have you ever seen a corset? This thing is indecent.” He tossed the bra away carelessly, and then, pushing her hands away, he cupped her breasts in his palms. Natasha gasped, arching into that hot firm touch, loving the friction of his roughened metal hand against that soft skin, the comparative smoothness of his right. He groped her as they kissed, kneading her flesh, pulling at her nipples till she was squirming, aching, throbbing, pressing into his hands, ready to beg.

“Tell me what you want,” he said, pressing kisses along the line of her jaw. “Tell me how you’ve imagined us doing this.”

Natasha laughed. “Every way imaginable,” she admitted. “All the ones we tried and all the ones we didn’t. You’d really want – I mean, for me to –”

“Be in charge?” he said innocently. “Fuck, yeah.”

“Wow,” she murmured. “Wow. Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“Get off the bed and strip?”

He shivered. “All right.”

“I want to make you feel as good as you made me feel earlier.”

For some reason that made him unsteady; there was a flush on his cheekbones as he stood up. Natasha stared as he stripped, letting all her enjoyment show on her face, her desire. She thought her frankness unsettled him – he couldn’t meet her eyes, and she remembered that morning in the kitchen when he’d made her breakfast and how he’d seemed… almost shy.

“You’re gorgeous,” she said experimentally, and watched a shiver run through him from head to foot.

“It –” he said, stupidly, and Natasha laughed.

“No you are.” She shuffled to the end of the bed and put her hands on him: oh, soft hot skin, a little sweaty, chest hair slightly coarse. Curious she traced the cut of his muscles, rubbed her thumb along his happy trail. Bucky was breathing quick, his chest heaving, and Natasha licked her lips and put her mouth on his nipples, left first, then right, tasting the faint salt on his skin and exploring the shape and texture of them under her tongue. His breath hitched; then he moaned, strangled little noise he was trying to choke off. He gripped her upper arms hard, and Natasha wriggled closer to him, looking up at him, grinning.

“This OK?” she said innocently. Deliberately slow, she ran her thumbs along the skin above the waistband of his underwear, explored the cut of his hips, the thick, solid waist, the small of his back and the swell of his ass; when she groped him his hips jerked forwards.

“Tease,” he said roughly.

Natasha kissed his chest, hot open-mouthed kisses along the line of his pectoral. “I want to know every inch of you. Every part.” For the first time she turned her attention to the seam of his left shoulder, tracing the scars that arrowed into his chest, raised and twisted or flat and smooth like burn scars; he was trembling now, poor darling. The prosthetic smelt faintly of metal and something maybe oily, and under her fingers it was warm as his body. With her eyes closed she tripped her fingertips over the plates, traced the interlocking rims, caressed the weld seam where the new arm and the old shoulder intersected. He was holding so still for her, so careful, not a plate slid or shifted, and when she put her mouth to the rills and rims and welds her fingers had just caressed Bucky made a raw, sobbing little noise.

“ _Tasha_ ,” he said, all choked up.

Tender fascination gave way to arousal again: that helplessness, that vulnerability, handed off to her so easily, left, unthinking, unhesitating, in her care.

“How do you do it?” she said, pushing his chin up with her fingertips to explore his throat and neck, tracing the muscles, feeling his pulse hammering against her lips. “Where do you get the guts from to just put it all out there and wait to see if someone else is going to hit you or not? My star, you’re so brave, to come to me like that, to risk it over and over –”

“God, Natalia, _stop_. I can’t – you can’t –”

“I can say whatever I want to you,” Natasha said, triumphant. “Any sweet stupid thing I want.”

“Damn!” he said, laughing.

“I missed you so,” she said.

“I missed you too.” He was touching her face, gentle fingers tracing the lines of her jaw and her nose, the shape of her mouth. “I can’t get my head round it – us, here.”

She kissed him, sweet this time, slow, beckoning. “Us, here. Come to bed, Bucky.”

He closed his eyes, smiling, rested his forehead against hers. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said my name while we’re –”

So it was. Natasha kissed him again. “Bucky.” She knew his name. Five minutes ago it had seemed so unremarkable; she’d known his name now for months, years. He was so warm when she pressed against him. Chest hair and hot smooth skin, the lines of his muscles, a nipple between her fingers, her breasts pushed against him. Bucky’s hands were in her hair, playing with her curls, caressing. He cupped her head as she pushed his pants and underwear down, but stepped back to get rid of them, let her see. Natasha ran her flat hand down his abs, following his happy trail, touched the strong thighs and the wiry dark pubic hair; then his balls – he shuddered, his hands clenching at his sides – and at last his cock, feeling it jump in the circle of her fingers, velvet soft skin, the line of the vein, pre-come at the tip.

She licked her lips, and he said, strangled, “Don’t even –”

“Turnabout’s fair play,” she said lazily. He was still shivering. “Touch me.” There. Hands on her shoulders to steady himself, but when he put one knee on the bed they grew bolder, stroking her shoulders, her neck. She was stroking him lazily, one hand over the other, rubbing at the head of his cock with her thumb on every stroke. His eyes were lidded, dark; he was biting his mouth, and his breathing was short and quick. Natasha could see the tenseness in him, how he was spiralling up where she wanted him; just a little more, she guessed, fascinated by the way his Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed, by the flush on his cheeks, the feel of his cock in her hands. She leaned in, rubbed her nose along his collar-bone, kissed the twisted skin of his scars, and when he moaned her name she tightened her grip and took his nipple in her mouth and felt him pulse in her hands –

“ _Natalia_ ,” Bucky said. No other sound; he was struggling already to keep his breathing steady, even as he pitched forwards into her arms. They had all the time in the world to learn to be loud… His come had hit her torso, was smeared over his abs, hot and sticky. She kissed his shoulder, the side of his neck, feeling his body heave and shudder.

“Perfect,” she said. “You’re perfect.”

“You’re a dream,” Bucky murmured. “Come here.” He caught her hips and manhandled her into the pillows; she let him, laughing, enchanted by the looseness of his smile, his unguarded movements, sweet and happy. “Look at you.” Natasha thought he’d go back to taking her jeans off, but instead he spread her legs and put his hands at either side of her hips. “Filthy.” And he bent and licked his come off her abs and the underside of her breasts.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Natasha blurted; her legs clamped around his shoulders without her conscious input, and she felt his laughter against her wet skin.

“Gonna eat you out like you promised I could.” Bucky took his time worrying a hickey into the side of her left breast; if she wore a low-cut shirt everyone would see it. It was her turn to shudder and gasp and bury her hands in his hair, holding him close, and then he leaned up over her to kiss her, and suddenly both of them were pulling her jeans down, and she was arching against his hot chest, laughing when she realised he was still hard. Oral was going to have to wait for the third date. Bucky was inside her and over her and on her and with her and Natasha kissed him hard and gasped his name whenever she had the breath to and said it over and over, as often as he did: I love you. I love you.

+++

Later, half-asleep in the gloaming as evening became night, Natasha started laughing. “Have I ever seen a corset! I’ll have you know, my boy –”

“I knew it,” Bucky crowed triumphantly. “It _was_ the Fifties, wasn’t it. I _knew_ it!”

“I want to you know that you’ve been outranked since long before the KGB got their hands on you, Sergeant.”

“I’ve never doubted that,” he said, and kissed her. “But it’s not like you to play Little Murder Orphan Annie for Fury and Barton for all this time.”

“Wiped,” Natasha said, pulling a face. “It didn’t exactly all come back at once.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it.” He sighed. She ran her hand over his chest, smiling. Oh how warm he was, and how good he felt, here in her arms.

“Long time ago.”

“Hmm. You know you’re screwed if Steve ever finds out you’re older than him, right?”

“Well you’re the only other one who knows.”

“Oh, blackmail material!”

She snorted. “What, so I’ll iron your shirts?”

“Pff. I wouldn’t trust you to iron my shirts.”

“Just for that,” she said, “I’m going to have to try.”

He groaned. “Please don’t ever.”

Natasha propped herself up on her elbow to look down into his face, amused. “You do like everything just so, don’t you.”

Bucky put his hand up to touch her face, smiling. “Not necessarily. But when I’m here, when it’s all ops and alien invasions and public committee meetings – then it’s control.”

“Mm. That’s true.” A careful façade: this is what you get of me, no more. Oh yes. She kissed his fingers. He was beautiful, sprawled across her bed like this; sex-ruffled and warm and quietly but completely happy, his face soft, his body inviting. She could have watched him lie there and do nothing for hours.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

“Hmm?”

“What next?”

Natasha rubbed her thumb over his nipple thoughtfully, and he shivered underneath her hand. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Bucky shrugged. The very ease of it was suspicious. “I’m happy when I’m with you,” he said, his voice quick and light. “The rest is details.”

Natasha glared. “Don’t do that.”

“What, be considerate?”

“Leave it all up to me. It’s not fair. Besides.” She struggled to find the words for it, the black fear of her own tendency to take the easy way out. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d been thinking, maybe he won’t love you again, that’ll keep the pain away. “I talk myself into… imaginary safety zones. I need you to need something from me too, you know. I can’t be the only one in this bed.”

“Jesus, you’re _not_. I never want to hurt you, you know.” It probably wasn’t a conscious movement, the way his fingers brushed her bullet scars. “This, you make me think I’ve never felt like this before, you know? It’s new again and it’s beautiful and I’m afraid it’s fragile.” Bucky drew a breath and repeated it. “I’m happy when I’m with you.”

Natasha had a sudden impulse to kiss the tip of his nose, so she did. “I don’t think it’s fragile.”

“No?” Bucky smiled.

“Definitely not.” She swallowed hard, and then she said it back to him. “I’m happy when I’m with you too. I always have been.”

“That’s not a bad start, is it? Hey, you were the one who wanted to be careful.”

Natasha waved her hand dismissively. “That was days ago. And I didn’t know if you remembered.”

“I like to think it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“So do I.” She kissed him, and Bucky pulled her down into his arms again, settling them into a comfortable embrace, her head on his chest, their legs tangled together.

“Catch some sleep?”

“Oh yes.” Natasha sighed happily. The warm metal of his left arm was lovely and smooth against her skin; they were safe, and they were here. The sound of his breathing lulled her slowly into a sweet happy doze.

Then both their phones went off.

 

 

 


End file.
